Greetings to all my patient friends who
have waited so long for this new installment of Scholegium -
or have simply forgotten that they were subscribed (if so, you
may unsubscribe with no hard feelings on my part). Schools and
colleges are back in session, new books and freshly sharpened
iPads.... I mean, pencils, are in students' hands and learning
is proceeding apace. Even if you are no longer formally a
student, I hope you have or are trying to cultivate a lifelong
student's love of learning. In this issue of Scholegium you'll
find some short pieces repeated from many years ago that I
still like: one is on how we ought to view history and our
place in it, another is on the passing of summer (since next
Saturday is the Autumnal Equinox, the official end of summer
and beginning of Autumn), then some brief thoughts on the
month we call September, and a final quote from the
seventeenth century about the season September ushers in.

I hope you enjoy this bouquet of musings.
And I hope you'll want to stay subscribed.

We live
at the end of history. But so does everyone who has ever lived
or ever will. If Charlemagne had drawn a timeline on a
blackboard, where would the line have stopped? At his time, of
course; so he lived at the end of history. If someone a
thousand years from now draws a timeline, his will stop at his
time and we will be somewhere along the line well before the
end. He too will be living at the end of history.

Every
ring in a tree trunk was once the outside edge, and what is
outside today will be inside in a few years when there is a
new outside that we do not yet see. In the same way, history
is a living thing that is growing, with the present simply
adding to it, like the tree whose outer layers are alive and
grow and add to the tree's size, while the inner layers,
though technically dead, still support the whole tree. History
is a living, growing thing that nourishes us who are its outer
edge and we depend on it for our life, just as the outer,
living edge of the tree trunk depends on the inner "dead"
layers for its support. History is a tree.

Time,
like an everflowing stream, bears all its sons away (to quote
a poet, one of our own) but not into nonexistence. The water
in a river is borne away constantly, but not into
nonexistence; it goes into that vast holding tank we call the
ocean, which is a continuous living thing. In the same way,
time bears all things into the great holding tank called
history, which is a continously living and growing thing.
History is an ocean.

We ought
not to think of the past as dead, and only our time real, for
when did history end and the present begin? Is yesterday
history? Is this morning history? How about a minute ago? Are
those part of history? The present moment is so fleeting, so
evanescent, that it's meaningless; we do not really live only
in the present moment, but rather we live in the present
moment as the front edge of all our growing past experience
which is our real life. Our experience, constantly, is made up
of memory of what has gone before--a few seconds ago, five
minutes ago, yesterday, fifty years ago, a thousand years ago.

If we
remember to think this way, then all of history is part of our
life, and though we experience the growing edge, we belong to
all of the life of man; we are inhabitants not of the present
moment which ceases to be present as soon as we're aware of
it, but we are inhabitants of all of history; and to ignore
the past is to ignore the largest part of our own life.

_____________________________________________

DE ASTRIS -- The
End of Summer (Late Summer Melancholy)

The high ridge to the south of our farm
dominates
our view of that horizon. It's called Moscow Mountain, though
it's not
really much of a mountain if you've seen the Rockies. It runs
in a long
blue line from east to west, and in the morning and evening
when the angle
of the sun's rays is low the smaller ridges and draws running
down from
the main line stand out as though they were magnified and
shaded. During
the summer the air is clear and hot and the mountain shimmers,
dark green
and solid and the sight makes me happy though I rarely think
about it.

But in late summer, in September, a haze
creeps
into the thinner blue air of noon and early afternoon and the
Mountain
is less distinct and less solid, more temporary and tenuous,
and it shimmers
as though it's about to vaporize; it's a perfect symbol of a
world heading
toward Fall. Normally, I like the word Autumn better,
especially when I'm
enjoying Autumn, but when I think of the coming season from
the perspective
of late summer, it's not Autumn, it's Fall -- and it feels
like one is
coming.

That haze over the mountain in
mid-September, and
the slow appearance of a subtle yellow in the woods reminds me
that summer
is ending, and everything about summer is ending, but it's no
conscious
reminder. The haze and color touches something in my gut and
makes my heart
ache before my brain realizes I'm thinking anything at all.
There's a hollowness
deep down that can't be filled, so deep down that it can't be
found --
only felt -- as I see, in the haze, the end of warm mornings
in June and
of sprinklers ticking into the night and of potatoes breaking
through the
soil and of green fields pushing up new green and of the dusty
smell of
hot dry pine needles in the open Ponderosa woods below the
house, and I
know that all those things are gone for another year. Dying,
dying, and
gone. The air is still blue and the noon sun is still bright
but it's somehow
less substantial, more hollow, and the hazy, blue noon air
over Moscow
Mountain feels to my eyes like it's already looking away and
not interested
anymore.

All I can feel is the end. I can't feel
next summer;
it's so far away that it doesn't even really exist. It's no
good saying,
it's just a season and there'll be next summer-- no, stop.
There is no
next summer. It's just an ethereal thought, a vague one at
best, a suggestion
that I can't grab onto with any of my senses, and so my
insides can't feel
it either. It's just a thought. But I can feel the end
of life, the
end of green, the end of hot fertility, the end of the warm,
lazy evenings
and early bird mornings and sprinkler-wet lawns. The year is
dying, and
I feel it in my bones.

I can't even feel the Autumn yet, just the
sadness
of no more summer. I know this melancholy will pass, and with
October will
come the sharp delight of cold mornings and sweaters and caps
and boots
and evening bonfires and the furnace rumbling on, and the
piercing pleasure
of the deep change of forest colors, and the stomach
butterflies in the
darkness of the first morning of hunting season, and the loud
World Series
arguments after dinner while the radio blatters
self-importantly, and the
cheer of the lights of the distant football field on Friday
nights where
all the pickups are parked with blanket-wrapped families
watching the kick-off,
and the self-absorption of all our planning for Thanksgiving
and Christmas,
and readying the house and yards for snow, and then the white
glee of the
snow itself, at least up on the mountain ridge if not down
here in the
fields and yards. The melancholy will be long gone then and I
can enjoy
Autumn the way it's supposed to be enjoyed, and I will, all of
it.

But right now summer is ending, and fall
hasn't
come, and all I can feel is the sadness of the ending; and the
melancholy
is very familiar because I've felt this way every year since I
was 15.
It's an ache that I expect all summer and now it's here, and I
can only
suggest it -- if you've never felt it then I can never explain
it to you.
I can only stand and gaze at Moscow Mountain in the hazy blue
noon air
and ache for the end of summer and all that we enjoyed in it.

Although this melancholy will pass, I hope
it doesn't
pass too soon; it's one of the sweetest pleasures I know.
Don't rush me.

_____________________________________________

ANNO DOMINI --
September

September gets its name, which comes from
the Latin
word "seventh", from the fact that it was the seventh month of
the old
Roman year which did not include July till Julius Caesar's
reign or August
till Augustus Caesar's. September was the beginning of the
year for the Eastern
Roman (Byzantine) Empire from the mid-fifth century onward,
and still is
the beginning of the ecclesiastical year for the Eastern
Orthodox church,
which has been shaped by Byzantine history. In the temperate
and northern
regions of Europe and American it's in the middle of the
harvest season
and was in fact called "harvest-month" by the Anglo-Saxons.
The full moon
in September (this year, 2012, it will be at the end of the
month) is traditionally called the "harvest moon", and poets
like
Edmund Spenser symbolize the month with sickles, scales, and
other harvest-time
agricultural implements. In the western world, the academic
year has already begun by the beginning of September, and of
course, the
end of summer comes in late September, on the autumnal equinox
(September
22 in 2012).

_____________________________________________

SIC LOCUTUS

"It is now September, and the Sunne begins
to fall
much from his height, and the meadowes are left bare, by the
mouthes of
hungry Cattell, and the Hogges are turned into the Corne
fields: the windes
begin to knocke the Apples heads together on the trees, and
the fallings
are gathered to fill Pyes for the Household: the Saylers fall
to worke
to get afore the winde, and if they spy a storme, it puts them
to prayer:
the Souldier now begins to shrug at the weather, and the Campe
dissolved,
the Companie are put to Garison: the Lawyer now begins his
Harvest, and
the Client payes for words by waight: the Innes now begin to
provide for
ghests, and the night-eaters in the stable, pinch the
Travailer in his
bed: Paper, pen, and inke are much in request, and the quarter
Sessions
take order with the way-layers: Coales and wood make toward
the Chimney,
and Ale and Sacke are in account with good fellowes: the
Butcher now knocks
downe the great Beeves, and the Poulters feathers make toward
the Upholster:
Walflet Oysters are the Fish wives wealth, and Pippins are the
Costermongers
rich merchandise: the flayle and the fan fall to worke in the
Barne, and
the Corne market is full of the Bakers: the Porkets now are
driven to the
Woods, and the home-fed Pigges make porke for the market. In
briefe, I
thus conclude of it, I hold it the Winters forewarning, and
the Summers
farewell.